Cornucopia of Cons

• "Ghost Gas [1]." Gas expands when temperatures are over 60 degrees. Gas stations are allowed to sell a "gallon" of gas in summer that delivers far less energy than a gallon in winter. Canada regulates against the problem. Dick Cheney's America doesn't. Let's see if the Democratic Congress has the guts to legislate against outright theft.

• When the Israeli government wanted to make sure they could keep occupying formerly non-Israeli territories, despite any subsequent change in government or international pressure, they created "facts on the ground": permanent settlements. Here are the facts on the ground [2] in Iraq.

• Bet your bottom dollar I'll be studying these just-released Nixon documents [3]. Fun new revelations: a Justice Department official wanted to recruit John Kerry as a Republican candidate; the White House tried to launder a story that Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sargent Shriver's ancestors were slave owners; and what about those "left-wing mob connections" in the McGovern campaign?

• Conservatives love to dote upon their supposed "intellectual" [4] patrimony. Ignorant of their actual history, they never have a word to say about the perfect overlap between conservative institutions and the most odious corporate public relations abominations. The latest: the conservative Independent Women's Forum [5] gave their "Women of Valor" award to a woman whose life's work is to pink-wash the depredation of companies whose chemicals very likely cause breast cancer [6].

• Does anyone doubt that had not conservatives been controlling our public agenda, municipal wifi connections would flow like water, and that the city of Moscow alone [7] wouldn't have nearly as much fiber optic density as the entire United States? "We will bury you," said Khruschev; it took the rise of the E. coli conservatism [8] to fulfill his prophesy.

• Conservatives outsource [9] the most sensitive government function imaginable: intelligence.

• If our enemy in Iraq is al Qaeda, and Iran is our enemy in Iraq's most crucial ally, how is it that al Qaeda [10] is threatening war against Iran?

• You've heard it here before [11]: an ignored epidemic of right-wing terrorism. Now, outside Fort Worth [12], a "radical Christian activist group" is caught celebrating the Fourth of July by attempting to blow up a an Evangelical church under construction. "[T]hey believe there should be one denomination and one church, not multiple denominations," according to a police spokesman.